Saturday, January 25, 2014

Stonehenge - An Unsolvable Puzzle

Hello! I'm now here to talk about a place that has haunted my dreams since I was a little kid: Stonehenge. I've never been there, but if someone tells me I could go to one place in the world I'd surely go there and see it by myself. I remember myself as a kid reading a book about Druids, the legendary Merlin and other stories related to Stonehenge... On this post, I'll include the first part of a 4-part documentary on Stonehenge. The links for the following parts will be after my opinion on this great monument.

What I think about this whole story can be synthesized in 5 words: Humanity underestimates its own ancestors. With the information we have right now, it's hard to believe that primitive beings would be able to build gigantic monuments such as Stonehenge or the pyramids. I think that the answer to "how" they did it is that they were not as primitive as we think they were.

Even with modern technology and engineering, it would be a great achievement to build monuments like those. In the case of Stonehenge not so much, but it would still take some work to go to a place to obtain the bluestones, be able to give them the exact shape we need for them to fit exactly. Also, it's been a while since man has made buildings and structures that will be able to last thousands of years. Ancient engineering was truly fabulous.

Going back to Stonehenge, for years we had no clue of what it meant. Until an archaeologist from Madagascar went to the place. In Madagascar, Stone means Death, and Wood means Life. This seemed to be irrelevant until they found a place some miles away from Stonehenge that seemed to have had similar structures made of wood. This is a common pattern in the ancient cultures: that civilizations who were half a world apart with no trace of connection between them have similar ideas and structures. Another example of this are the similarities between Mesopotamian Ziggurats and Mayan Pyramids.

Ziggurat

Mayan Pyramid

Also, the alignment with summer and winter solstices of Stonehenge and what may be called Woodhenge speaks a lot about its use. We think that Stonehenge was part of a ritual concerning death, life and the solstices. Still, there's a lot that we don't know, and maybe it will remain as a doubt until we create a machine with which we can see into the past.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxMLJegGQEIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbJlil-8yZQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC-cDJ6e4CM